Writing
Photography


1. Peonies
Last Year at China (after Alain Resnais)
Created at Kala Art Institute
Berkeley, CA, 2026


Lumen print.








1. Peonies
Childhood
Created at Kala Art Institute
Berkeley, CA, 2026


Lumen print.







1. Oriented
Harvest
Summer Lake, OR
2025

Medium-format.









1. Mythos in Time, i & ii
Created at Kala Art Institute
Berkeley, CA, 2026

ii exhibited at Bathers Library, Cohorts Season One Group Show

Lumen print.











1. Oriented
Refuge
Summer Lake, OR


Medium-format.












1. A Chinese Money Plant Grows in Berkeley
Lady Beatles
Los Angeles, 2021


Portraiture of Asian America.





1. Boughs (left)
2. A Mountain and a Forest (right)
Boughs originally appeared in Denver Quarterly Issue 59.2, 2025
2023


Scenes of deforestation.









1. Flowering Sea
Group Show, On-Line Annex at Black Box Gallery
Yosemite Valley, CA
2023


Yosemite series.




















Profile
Danielle Shi



Rowland Heights, CA

@author_danielleshi













Born in Dalian, China, Danielle was raised in Irvine, California and received a B.A. in English from UC Berkeley, where she was mentored by Fae Myenne Ng. After living in China, she went on to receive her M.A. in the Humanities at the University of Chicago, studying with W. J. T. Mitchell. She has received fellowships from Vermont Studio Center, the Prelinger Library, Winslow House Project, PLAYA Summer Lake, and The Ruby, as well as support for her writing from Left Margin LIT, Off Assignment, and the Kearny Street Workshop.

In Fall 2026, she will begin her MFA in Writing at Columbia University. She is represented by Michele Mortimer at Darhansoff & Verrill Literary Agents.

Danielle has written for zyzzyva.org, The Adroit Journal, Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape, The Drift, The Rumpus, The Margins, and other publications. Her poetry and prose have been nominated for Best New Poets and the PEN Dau Award, and have received recognition from Gulf Coast, Dzanc Books, and Puerto del Sol. Her photography has been shown in group and solo shows, as well as in Denver Quarterly and Common Forms.




Photo by Tim Tran

Education
The University of Chicago
Masters in the Humanities
2019

The University of California, Berkeley
BA English (Minor Creative Writing)
2018

Beijing University
(3 months)




ResearchRob Sean Wilson
Research Assistant
The University of California, Santa Cruz
2023

Christopher T. Fan
Research Assistant
The University of California, Irvine
2020 - 2021

Sophie Volpp
Research Assistant
The University of California, Berkeley
2017




Publications
Asian American Writers’ Workshop: The Margins
Bathers Library Mini Mag
California Magazine
Common Forms
Copytext Magazine
Denver Quarterly
Doll Hair
Hyphen Magazine
I Have That on Vinyl
UC Berkeley Letters & Science
Irrelevant Press
Jaded Ibis Press: Scarlet, A Literary Journal
La Piccioletta Barca
Mande: A Journal of Bipolar Talent
Michigan Quarterly Review: MQR Mixtape
Sine Theta Magazine
The Adroit Journal
The Annex
The Daily Californian
The Drift
The Frida Cinema
The Orange County Register
The Rumpus
UChicago Arts
UChicago News
Whale Road Review
zyzzyva




Exhibitions & Readings
The Shelter
Reading and presentation
Prelinger Library
2026

The Shelter
Reading
Light Jacket Series
2026

Mythos in Time, ii
Group Show, Cohorts Season One
Bathers Library
2026

Cotton Candy
Group Show, On-Line Annex
Black Box Gallery
2025

The Shelter (excerpt)
Literary Artist
Kearny Street Workshop APAture: (Un)Becoming
2025

林/Lean (Tree Interlude)
Solo Exhibition
The Crown: Royal Coffee Lab & Tasting Room
2025

Doll Hair
Exhibitor, Chinese Culture Center
Chinatown Ross Alley Zine Festival
2024

“Halcyon” from Unsaid (Doll Hair 2024)
Literary Artist
Kearny Street Workshop APAture: RETURN
2024

Haptic
Group Show, SHIM/Photo 
Superfine! Art Fair, DC
Armstrong Gallery, CT
Aqua Art Miami, FL
United Film Lab Network, NY
2023 - 2024

Flowering Sea
Group Show, On-Line Annex
Black Box Gallery
2023

MONONOKE
Group Show, Blick Art Show
The Frida Cinema
2023





AwardsArrhythmia
Semifinalist
Iron Horse Literary Review/Texas Tech University Press First Book of Prose Prize 
2025

The Ruby
Creative-in-residence
2025 - 2026

Kala Art Institute
Artist-in-residence
2025 - 2026

Off Assignment
Scholarship award
2025 - 2026

School for Poetic Computation
Scholarship award
2025

Kearny Street Workshop Interdisciplinary Writers Lab
Scholarship award
2025

PLAYA Summer Lake
Fully-funded residency
2025

Winslow House Project
Fully-funded residency
2025

Prelinger Library
Artist-in-residence, $1,000 grant
2025

Left Margin LIT
Scholarship award
2025

Vermont Studio Center
Fully-funded residency
2025

“Halcyon”
Runner-up
Gulf Coast Barthelme Prize for Short Fiction
2025

Arrhythmia
Longlisted
Dzanc Books Prize for Fiction
2024

“Exhalations”
Finalist
Puerto del Sol Prose Contest
2024

“Two Poems in the Ruin Style [sic]”
Nominated for Best New Poets
2025

“Rosemary Folk”
Nominated for PEN Dau Prize
2023




Volunteer
zyzzyva
Staff Writer
2022 - Present 

The Rumpus
Poetry Reader
2024 - 2026

Prison Journalism Project
Journalism Mentor
2024 - 2026

Doll Hair
Co-founder
2024 - 2026

Kearny Street Workshop
Festival Mentee
2025

Quiet Lightning
Graphics Volunteer
2024 - 2025

Chinese Culture Center
Gallery Volunteer
2024

The Frida Cinema
Blog Team Member
2022 - 2024

Red Hen Press
Production Intern
2023

Assignment01
Founder
2022 - 2023

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
K-12 Talk Education Blog Intern
2020

WHPK 88.5FM
Radio DJ
2019




Publication History

Canon Wars Redux: On Naomi Kanakia’s ‘What’s So Great About the Great Books?’. ZYZZYVA. May 16, 2026
A Map of Desire: Thomas Dai’s ‘Take My Name, But Say It Slow’: Essays. ZYZZYVA. May 16, 2026
A Review of Jake Rose’s JOAN. The Adroit Journal. May 6, 2026
Restored to Flight: Fifty Mothers by Preeti Vangani. ZYZZYVA. April 20, 2026
Dandelion: A Memoir in Essays by Danielle Bainbridge. The Adroit Journal. February 16, 2026
Diary Study Issue. Bathers Library Mini Mag Special Edition. January 17, 2026
Excerpts from The Shelter. Copytext Magazine. December 19, 2025
Exhalations. Doll Hair. December 12, 2025
Hothouse Bloom by Austyn Wohlers. The Adroit Journal. November 5, 2025
Take-Home Assignment: Teaching Creative Writing Through Online Journaling. Whale Road Review. September 13, 2025
A Conversation With Thomas Dai. The Adroit Journal. September 10, 2025
Coming Into Leaf. Mande: A Journal of Bipolar Talent. August 5, 2025
I’m writing a book. Bathers Library Mini Mag #1. July 10, 2025
Prizing Possibility Over All: ‘A Toast to St Martirià’ by Albert Serra
. ZYZZYVA. June 19, 2025
That I Should Stop Searching for Whoever I Was Before: ‘True Mistakes’ by Lena Moses-Schmitt. ZYZZYVA. June 12, 2025
To Ride Is to Fall, To Live Is to Fall: ‘Riding’ by Pardis Mahdavi. ZYZZYVA. June 10, 2025
The Architecture of Memory: ‘Poet in the Neighborhood: Selected Poems of Rafael Alcides. ZYZZYVA. June 5, 2025
The Sorrow and the Fury: ‘Gaza: The Poem Said Its Piece’ by Nasser Rabah. ZYZZYVA. May 30, 2025
pandopticon【熊猫之眼】. Doll Hair. April 24, 2025
Étude of Eluding: Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express. Michigan Quarterly Review: Mixtape. April 21, 2025
Samurai Champloo’s Departure and its Arrival. I Have That on Vinyl. April 8, 2025
Boughs. Denver Quarterly | Issue 59.2, The University of Denver. January 14, 2025
Future Conversations 【后天话】. Doll Hair. November 9, 2024
Osmanthus Nocturne No. 4 【桂香夜曲第四】. Doll Hair. October 31, 2024
No Pouting. Doll Hair. October 29, 2024
As Ever, Your Totem. The Rumpus. October 17, 2024
Petrichor. Doll Hair. October 4, 2024
Unsaid. Doll Hair. September 6, 2024
SOFT. Common Forms | A MAPH Journal, The University of Chicago. May 3, 2024
Petrichor. La Piccioletta Barca. April 19, 2024
“Stories can migrate into another landscape”: Author & lecturer Fae Myenne Ng speaks about her book, Orphan Bachelors. UC Berkeley Letters & Science. April 9, 2024
Two Poems in the Ruin [sic] Style. Asian American Writers’ Workshop: The Margins. April 9, 2024
Sweetie. Jaded Ibis Press: Scarlet, A Literary Journal. March 26, 2024
Feelings/Piano 感情/琴. February 20, 2024
Reveries, Dreams, and Kurosawa. The Frida Cinema. January 23, 2024
Monster’s Suburban Delusions. The Frida Cinema. January 9, 2024
The Writer’s Room: Unconventional Christmas Movies. The Frida Cinema. December 22, 2023
Entering the Borderland of The Boy and the Heron. The Frida Cinema. December 15, 2023
The Writer’s Room: Food Films. The Frida Cinema. December 4, 2023
Orphan Bachelors. California Magazine. December 1, 2023
Hausu and the Young Girl’s Heart. The Frida Cinema. November 9, 2023
Here, There, and Nowhere in The Double Life of Veronique. The Frida Cinema. October 3, 2023
Maladies & Missed Connections in Maurice Pialat’s Van Gogh. The Frida Cinema. September 20, 2023
Metronome. September 28, 2023
Remembrance in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror. The Frida Cinema. July 26, 2023.
Chinese Cinema of Belated Space & Time: Center Stage. The Frida Cinema. June 26, 2023
ENFANT ; a cowboy ballad. Irrelevant Press. June 4, 2023
Chinese Cinema of Belated Space & Time: Raise the Red Lantern. The Frida Cinema. June 2, 2023
Chinese Cinema of Belated Space & Time: Youth (Fang Hua). The Frida Cinema. May 8, 2023
Chinese Cinema of Belated Space & Time: 2046. The Frida Cinema. April 12, 2023
A Disabled Lens on Alex Garland’s Annihilation: Pessimistic Surrealism. The Frida Cinema. April 7, 2023
‘Novelist as Vocation’ by Haruki Murakami: Persistence as Key. ZYZZYVA. March 24, 2023
Mentions: The Blue Notebooks. The Drift. February 28, 2023
All Too Human: Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar. The Frida Cinema. January 4, 2023
Q&A with Kathleen Balma. ZYZZYVA. November 2, 2022
Staff Recommends October 2022: What to Watch, Read, & Listen to. ZYZZYVA. October 31, 2022
Rosemary Folk. Sine Theta Magazine. October 30, 2022
Staff Recommends August 2022: What to Watch, Read, & Listen to. ZYZZYVA. August 31, 2022
Gen Z Speaks Out: A Conversation with YoungArts Artists. Hyphen Magazine. April 11, 2021
Student creates surrealist self-portraits that reflect her Chinese heritage. UChicago News. August 13, 2019
“I’m fascinated by the neuroscience of visual perception.” UChicago Arts. July 24, 2019
Review: Severance by Ling Ma. UChicago Arts. June 19, 2019
Lures: On Following the Deer. The Annex. December 20, 2017
UC Berkeley lecturer, John Shoptaw, releases first poetry collection. The Daily Californian. June 18, 2015
‘28 Chinese’ exhibit opens at Asian Art Museum. The Daily Californian. June 12, 2015


Updated 26.06.04



Photo by Tim Tran

1. The Shelter
Represented by Darhansoff & VerrillAuthor page
Berkeley, Placerville, Rowland Heights, San Francisco, CA 2022–2026


In early 2023, I drove to Placerville, CA to start writing a novel about a countryside that I was experiencing firsthand while living in my car. 

This manuscript, The Shelter, is about the Chinese American consultant Adeline’s disappearance into a small town. Her mother’s psychosis leads her to question the teachings of the syncretic religious cult she was raised in, as well as its outsized influence over her parents’ former marriage and her own relationship to God. Adeline’s escapist misadventure reveals dark truths about the classist attitudes that brought her to the town in the first place. In place of her past, however, arise visions of striking pastoral beauty, and a closeness of relationships that challenge her assumptions about the country. 

The Shelter balances a rural community’s response to homelessness with a close examination of white terror and anti-Chinese sentiment in the American program of nation-making.








1. Arrhythmia
Semifinalist for Iron Horse Literary Review/Texas Tech University Press First Book of Prose Prize 2025
Longlisted for Prize for Fiction, Dzanc Books 2024

Rowland Heights, CA 2024

Arrhythmia examines my academic life as a graduate student struggling with a mental illness diagnosis at the University of Chicago. Structured after a Choose Your Own Adventure and inspired by the frame narrative of If on a winter’s night a traveler by Italo Calvino, Arrhythmia's short stories unfold like a Russian nesting doll, with each past materializing within the next. As I make a grab for what I dropped in Berkeley’s student housing co-operatives, I embark on a mental journey to the great Sixties, falling into Casa Zimbabwe and Kingman Hall’s storied histories of madness and mayhem. I romp around Outer Los Angeles suburbia and from there dig a tunnel to the Cheongsam Hostel in Old Beijing, finding myself—and my peace of mind—along the side of the road.









1. Cat Logic
Manuscript mentored by W. J. T. Mitchell, Jeanne Jelnick — Creative Masters Thesis: Technicolor Tensions: Deracination in the Model Minority Narrative
Advised by Augustus Rose, Darrel Chia — The University of Chicago
2019


Cat Logic is a tale of youthful disregard set in the long cast shadow of the Berkeley housing co-ops. George hails from a hamlet in rural Northern California, and cyclically goes against the grain of generic campus living, finding himself maladjusted to the hardness of the city. An aspiring playwright, he indulges in spinning fanciful stories around the gathered deer of the city, dutifully logging their bad encounters with environmental toxicity and harmful pollutants. When George encounters his classmate Jacqueline while chasing deer in the vastness of the wooded glen behind campus, they begin to madly compose stories for each other about the animals' mystical appearances, using them as a magical portal through which to overcome their surface differences. This unifying thread of closeness keeps the obsessed pair attempting to narrativize the other's existence, and grasping for control of their shared main narrative. As they desperately reach out towards a semblance of sanity, unbeknownst to the two, their growing overreliance on a substance-powered approach to storytelling begins to renege upon the animals' sacred wood, making an environmental fable of their strange connection.










1. As Ever, Your Totem
The Rumpus
2024


When my cat, Bunny, died of a seizure, I wanted a way to preserve her image. She had helped me escape my loneliness during Chicago’s imitation of fall, my hand deep in her snowy fur, its black and orange tufts akin to monarch wings, shards fragmenting her small back. Fuzzy with sleep, I would awaken to her chewing the ends of my hair. From my studio by Lake Michigan, I watched as the drifts fell down unceasingly, thick piles atop cars, as though the entire world were on tilt. We were no more than shades in the cold daylight. Every evening, I would write, the words blurring together, her accompanying me like a sentinel.


[More..]








1.Petrichor
First published in La Piccioletta Barca
Petrichor (Doll Hair 2024)


The ringback tone for the photography lab and the mental hospital were one and the same. Two places you had dwelled—belonging to, two. Her. Saving your mother from ocean death. Saving, Heidegger said, meaning only to set her free into her own presencing. She was once all your shelter. Dependencies. Extrication. Flight. The pilotess of a balsa wood model, nosediving into the bonfire pits exuding firelight over the dunes.


[More..]








1. Lures
On Following the Deer The Annex, Creative Nonfiction with Scott Saul The University of California, Berkeley 2017

I started seeing deer, really seeing them, in the summer, around the fog and Japanese maples behind the university.


[More..]











© 2026 Danielle Shi